Wearing Your Heart on Your Face: Reading Lovesickness and the Suicidal Impulse in Chaucer.
- Author / Editor
- McNamara, Rebecca F.
Wearing Your Heart on Your Face: Reading Lovesickness and the Suicidal Impulse in Chaucer.
- Published
- Literature and Medicine 33.2 (2015): 258-78.
- Description
- In BD, Chaucer reinvents the "dits amoreux" tropes of Froissart (in "Le paradis d'Amours") and Machaut (in "Le jugement dou roy de Behaingne"), applying Galen's humoral medicine to depictions of the lovelorn knight. Likewise, in KnT, the banished Arcite's plight foregrounds humoral imbalance and melancholy, and his death is described in Galenic detail. Establishes how both texts invite the audience to a closer and more empathic reading of suicidal characters than is usually available within the "artifice" of "fin'amors" poetry.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Book of the Duchess
Knight and His Tale
Sources, Analogues, and :Literary RElations